3 Steps to Build a Website to Teach English – Part 2

This is basically a continuation from part 1 where I showed you how to lay down a foundation for your online shop utilizing GoDaddy’s domain service, BlueHost’s hosting and a StudioPress theme.

I mentioned last time in this Teaching English in Brazil series, about the importance of having an online presence when teaching English (or doing business) and some of the results it will give you, and today I am going to show you the final steps to start an easy website that can help you be lucrative when teaching online (or for advertising yourself).

The steps I will go over are specifically catered to an English teaching website but like I have mentioned before, can be used for other online business.

Keep in mind that this is based on a lot of research into what successful teachers are using out there.

This is where setting up your site gets more exciting as everything begins coming together!

Note: these how tos are based on products that I myself use, other successful online marketers use and are proven to work.  I stand by them but please do not feel that you have to purchase anything to be successful at teaching English. 

I really believe that by following these steps, it will launch you into a faster and more successful business.

Last time we went over the bare bones of how to get the foundation into place, and this time we will build upon it.

1. Introducing WordPress and Installing your Theme

Since all of the foundational work was done in part 1 of the Teaching English in Brazil guide, I will begin showing you how to set up WordPress, set up your template in the right order (Genesis and theme).

By them time this how to video is complete, you will be ready to put the finishing touches to have a fully functional website

(Click to watch  on YouTube)

That should be pretty straight forward but to summarize, I showed you how to:

1. log into the newly set up WordPress system
2. Upload and activate the Genesis framework
3. Upload and activate your theme
4. Add and use widgets
5. Adjust general settings

I ended the video by telling you that I would stop the video so that I could set up the website and show you what I did step by step.

2. Customizing your StudioPress Theme and Setting up the Website + your Free E-mail Account

So, now you should have the general (rough) layout of your site up and running and your site will look pretty bad at this point, but don’t worry, this is normal!

It’s time to do something about the sites ugliness, start polishing it up a bit and making it look how you want it to.

Watch this video as I show you how to do so.

(Click to watch  on YouTube)

It should be straight forward but to summarize, I showed you how to:

1. Mess with General Settings (again)
2. Add and remove a WordPress user
3. Set up website pages
4. Create menus
5. Changing SEO setting (Search Engine Optimization)
6. Add a newsletter (I use OptinSkin)
7. Find, install and manage plugins
8. Add a widget code into a page
9. Know what parts of the page the widgets refer to
10. Add a header (960px X 120px in my theme)
11. Posting pictures
12. Add a Blog post
13.  Categorize your Blog post
14. Tag your blog post (Correction: I mentioned in the video that this is for Google, this is true but it is for organizing your content on your website as well (so people can easily find it).)
15. Set up your customized e-mail account for your site (from BlueHost’s control panel)

3. Where to get Graphic Work Done and Find Pictures

In the video I mentioned that you do not want to take pictures from Google and other places you find them randomly, it is copyright infringement and you could be sued.

I also mentioned that you can have graphic work crowd sourced for relatively cheap on the net.

Finding Pictures

You want to get your pictures from sites that are open to be used and shared, this is called a “creative commons license”.

Two free sites I use personally are and .  Under “search” make sure that you choose “creative commons” in Flickr!

The premium site I use is called , this is the Mecca for professional pictures.  To give you an example, the pictures I used in my banner, video series and many blog posts is from Istockphoto.

If you find a great, free professional picture on the free sites, great.  But if you don’t find it there, I guruantee you that it will be found on Istockphoto.

Crowd Sourcing

These days getting a professional and amazing looking banner, eBook cover or any other graphic work is cheap and fast to get done.

I recommend going with Crowd Sourcing.  This works by you setting up an account, offering a bid price (how much you are willing to part with to get a banner or whatever done) and then sitting back while professional designers compete to make the best looking graphics for you.

Then after the bid timeframe is up (after a few days or so), you choose the winning design and pay the designer his “award”.

I would expect to pay around a couple hundred dollars for a nice banner.

This is better and cheaper then going with one graphic design company because you have a lot of creativity to choose from.  And don’t worry, there are lots of rules that protect these designers from being exploited in any way, it is actually a quite fair system.

The site I use is called www.99designs.com, they have the biggest community of designers to choose from who specialize in graphic work.

Final Word

Later on in this series, I will go over some tips on how to build up a following of English students whether it be offline or online.  But make sure you really consider the idea of having a newsletter, a Facebook like page, a twitter account and so on.  You want people to follow you so that you can interact with them.

A website now days is vital to your business’ success, so make sure to jump onto the band wagon!

I really hope that this part of the tutorial has been helpful in aiding you to build your successful English teaching business in Brazil and I wish you the best of luck with this.

Look forward to the next part!

Valeu, cheers!

Kevin